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30 September 2018 8:40 AM

The biggest thing that didn’t happen this year was the final collapse of Bill Clinton’s reputation.

The former President, and his warmongering and strangely supportive wife Hillary, have somehow managed to escape the great ultra-feminist frenzy that has brought down so many men from their pedestals of power and reputation.

Personally, I’m not especially troubled by Bill’s survival. Against my own will, I almost like the terrible old monster. I was once bathed in his chicken-fried charm for a delightful, unforgettable minute when I slipped uninvited into a White House event and asked him an awkward question about Ireland. Ah, I thought, so this is what they mean by charisma.

He may have helped the IRA to win, but he didn’t invade Iraq. There are worse men, and worse women.

In any case, I’m not in favour of ruining people’s lives on the basis of ancient, uncorroborated claims. And I’m less and less interested in other people’s sexual doings. Morals are about what we do when we think nobody is looking. They are not about denouncing other people for doing things that we wouldn’t do ourselves.

But the current attempt to destroy Judge Brett Kavanaugh, nominated for the US Supreme Court, raises a huge question of hypocrisy and inconsistency. None of us, it seems to me, can ever know what happened, if anything happened, between him and his accuser all those years ago. We have to accept that the charges may be true. Equally we have to accept that they may not be. But once made, such charges can ruin the lives of those against whom they are made, whether they are true or not, let alone whether they are proved or not.

I have no idea how such things can be fairly resolved. It has to rest with the consciences of those who make the accusations. Some of them have genuinely suffered and rightly thirst for justice. Others may be confused and unhappy. Others, just possibly, may be making it up. But how can we know which is which? These accusers know what will happen when they speak. Are they sure they want it to happen? Are they sure they are right? Memory being what it is, I’d hesitate greatly about raking up anything from 10 years ago, let alone 36 years ago.

But here is the inconsistency. Why is Judge Kavanaugh being barbecued by the US Senate, while Bill Clinton goes unscathed? Well, yes, they did try and fail to impeach Mr Clinton, but it was the very people who voted against his impeachment who are now trying to unhorse Judge Kavanaugh. It is plainly about politics, not personal morals.

Also, in those days, sexual scandal had a different point to it. In the 1990s marital fidelity was still, just, a big issue, and those who breached it were seen as unreliable in all things. Now, marriage is a foible of the privileged, and the scandals are all about men’s attitudes towards women, and feminism. Well, why isn’t Bill Clinton back in trouble in that case? If his accusers told the truth, he broke the #MeToo code just as much as he betrayed his marriage.

I know more than I ought to about one of the allegations against Mr Clinton. By a series of accidents, I came to have some long conversations with Paula Jones, one of his accusers. She made a persuasive case, not least because she didn’t try to make out that her own behaviour had been totally saintly.

What she told me was in some ways very funny, a comedy of misunderstandings and disappointment. The details are far too rude to recount here. I’ll just say that what she says he wanted to do, didn’t appeal to her. And that, by her account, he took her refusal badly. And he was a powerful man. And she was a powerless woman from a poor background.

But nobody wants to revisit this because, really, this issue is about politics, not about principle. The outrage, as so often, is selective and so not real. I am, above all, sorriest for the families of those accused, and of their accusers. And I wish it wasn’t futile to suggest that a return to the stricter sexual morals of the pre-Pill years would make relations between men and women a lot kinder and more civilised than they seem to be now.

*********

Why did the 'Bodyguard' hero surrender to the therapists?

The biggest letdown of the BBC’s ‘Bodyguard’ was the fate of its supposed hero, David Budd. After standing his ground against a crooked Prime Minister, MI5, his own police colleagues and a bunch of Islamist suicide bombers, he meekly surrendered to the therapy industry.

And, within weeks of him agreeing to accept that he was a victim of ‘PTSD’, and being presumably stuffed up to the eyeballs with ‘antidepressants’, his broken marriage was restored to health and, smiling and relaxed, he was off on holiday with his happy children – presumably looking forward to a gentle new career investigating historic sex crimes, far from the perilous streets.

Not everybody actually accepts this version of how to be happy. People who have been in danger and combat do no doubt suffer. But is it an illness, or a natural reaction? And can it really be put right by therapy, let alone by dubious pills whose claims have never been properly tested, and whose side-effects can be worse than the problems they claim to treat?

Perhaps Jed Mercurio, and the BBC, might consider a drama about a big pharmaceutical firm trying to prevent the fact coming out about its products? Or is that too close to the truth?

Police tattoos say 'We don't care what you think, and we are not your servants'

The plan to relax the Metropolitan Police rules on tattoos (no doubt to be followed swiftly elsewhere) is yet another snub to the public. Tattoos are frightening and disturbing to many. What the police are saying is that they don’t care what we think. It is yet another demonstration that they have ceased be the servants of the public, and become instead the guardians of the strong and distant state, who regard us and our concerns as a nuisance, like the very worst of the old nationalised industries.

Muddled Charlie is in a sorry state

Lord Falconer, who rose to high office after doing hard time as the Blair Creature’s flatmate, has joined the simpering wide-eyed chorus of deluded, has-been politicians who want to legalise drugs. He has absurdly apologised for supporting so-called ‘prohibition’ of drugs while he was in the Blair government.

Actually, as he really ought to know since he was a Justice Minister, there was no such prohibition. The Blair government, like those before and after, turned a blind eye to the widespread non-enforcement of the law, so greatly increasing the drug problem and the crime and mental illness that come with it.

When I challenged him on this, he whimpered that enforcing the cannabis laws would be too hard. And this from a member of a government that didn’t think it too hard to invade Iraq on false pretexts, so creating endless bloodshed and chaos, or too hard to trash our constitution with ill-designed reforms. If Charlie wants to apologise, he has other things he should say sorry for.

Even if the warmists are right, closing British coal-fired power stations is futile.

While Britain madly closes its remaining coal-fired power stations, so risking power cuts in the near future, because the wind often doesn’t blow and the sun frequently doesn’t shine, China is building dozens of new ones. We know this because the Green pressure group CoalSwarm has studied satellite images and found an enormous 259 gigawatts of new coal-fired generating capacity is under development in China, despite claims by Peking that is cutting coal generation. Even if you believe the Warmist claim that climate change is caused by human activity, China’s coal policy makes our sacrifice of efficient reliable power quite pointless.

23 September 2018 1:44 AM

I have a nightmare. It goes like this. The Government abandons futile negotiations with an arrogant European Union and declares: ‘Very well, we are going it alone!’ Many cheer at this demonstration of Churchillian toughness.

And then the day comes for our departure, and there is chaos, beca use all the warnings come true – that without the Single Market almost all of our links with EU countries have no legal basis, and an impossible barrier of bureaucracy grounds planes, traps lorries and closes the Channel Tunnel.

The problem with this nightmare is that it is impossible to be sure that it will not happen at the end of March next year. Nobody really knows. What if it does happen? I will come to that.

Before anyone accuses me of spreading Remainer propaganda, I would like to point out that I have been urging a British departure from the EU since I visited Norway in June 2003. As I wrote here then: ‘Norway is prosperous, happy and free. Its countryside is neat and well husbanded, its towns and cities orderly and comfortable… it runs its ow n affairs, trading cheerfully with the EU.

‘Its fisheries and farms have not been wrecked or bankrupted, as ours have, by “Common” policies that suit France, Germany or Spain. Its supreme court is in Oslo, not Luxembourg, where ours is. Its monarchy is not menaced by a European president and its flag doesn’t have to fly alongside the EU’s yellow stars.’

Until then I had been vaguely hostile to the EU, but not actively in favour of quitting it.

After Norway, I wanted to leave, though most of those now noisily flourishing Union Jacks and demanding exit at all costs were either silent, bored, or actively in favour of staying. I still don’t know what’s come over them.

About the same time, I read the superb book, The Great Deception, by Christopher Booker and Richard North, by far the best account of the long story of shame and dishonesty which is Britain’s involvement in the EU. Both men, like me, want us to leave. I began to notice, after reading it, the pitiful level of knowledge of the subject in our political class, and in our media.

And that disastrous ignorance is still obvious in almost everything anyone says about it from either side. I doubt most people know the difference between the Single Market and the Customs Union. Well, Christopher Booker and Richard North do, and they, like me, are deeply worried that we may be about to walk blithely into national danger. We are in a small but growing group of Leavers who are urging that we follow the Norway option while there is still time.

This might mean postponing the day of our departure, but in general it would be extremely simple. We would stay in the Single Market, so avoiding the threatened chaos at our borders, but leave the Customs Union, so allowing us to trade freely around the world.

WE would get back control of our farms and fishing grounds, dump the Luxembourg court, shake off three-quarters of EU interference in our laws, and significantly reduce our payments to the EU. We could also exploit a loophole allowing us much greater control of immigration than we have now.

Perfect? No. But perhaps best of all, it requires no lengthy negotiation. We stay in the European Economic Area (we already belong to it) and seek to return to the European Free Trade Association. The arrangement can be lifted off the shelf and will work. No crises, no lorries parked for miles on the M20.

Yet so many Leavers are against this. I don’t really see why.

For years people have said they were quite happy with a European free trade area (which is what many think they voted for back in 1975) – they just didn’t want the political interference.

The Norway option gives us exactly that arrangement.

Do they really think that 40 years of close and intricate integration with the EU can simply be pulled out by the roots overnight? Do they think Britain is so big, so rich and so brilliant at exporting that it can suddenly launch itself out into the world without a backward glance, like a superpower?

What if our brave exit in March goes wrong ? What if the nightmare is real? I can, alas, see it now. The tottering Government, the closed factories and the queues at the shops, the snap Election.

And the new Prime Minister taking a rusty ferry to Ostend and then on to Brussels, there to beg to be allowed back, as smiling Eurocrats explain that, yes, we are welcome to return, but only if we abandon our own currency, our own legal system and become at last what they have always wanted us to be – truly, fully, horribly European.

Wouldn’t the Norway option be better than even the chance of that happening?

***

Stupid people keep saying that supporters of railway renationalisation can’t remember what British Rail was like. Oh, yes I can.

And if BR had been given the money poured into the pockets of the privatised rail pirates, it would now be running far, far better services than we currently have.

On Friday, I was late for work because it had been windy the night before – and this on a line where privatised operators have had the benefit of more than £1 billion in modernisation. Parts of this have already cost three times what was planned, everything is years behind time and will probably never be finished. Nationalised BR completed a similar scheme only eight weeks late and within £15 million of its predicted budget.

***

I am going to keep saying this. Most of the supposed Islamist terror attacks in Europe (and many of the non-Islamist massacres elsewhere) involve people who have been taking either marijuana, steroids or so-called ‘antidepressants’.

The inquest into the Westminster outrage shows clearly that the killer Khalid Masood, a violent criminal, took steroids and suffered from the terrifying ‘roid rage’, which apologists for these dangerous drugs claim is a myth.

Other mass killers who took steroids include the very non-Muslim Anders Breivik.

I didn't expect or even want to like the new BBC series Killing Eve, starring Jodie Comer, pictured, as a distractingly beautiful embodiment of pure evil.

The trailers put me off. But the programme itself is an unexpected joy, looking and sounding witty, refusing to treat viewers as idiots, and, actually, a lot better than the overrated Bodyguard.

***

The PM has started to be nice about social housing, or council housing as we used to call it. She says: ‘I want to see social housing that is so good people are proud to call it their home… Our friends and neighbours who live in social housing are not second-rate citizens.’

Good, though anyone who recalls the council housing of the 1960s and 1970s (I was myself briefly a council tenant in the 1970s) would say that most council house residents were house-proud and often very pleased to have a secure well-maintained place to live.

I am sick of people saying the great sell-off of council homes was a good thing. It flooded the housing market with taxpayers’ money and sent prices spinning upwards forever. It broke up communities. And it began the expensive, wasteful disaster of housing benefit which, the last time I looked, cost more than the RAF every year.

I don’t know if we can ever put this right again, but admitting we made a mistake by breaking up the old council estates would be good.

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09 September 2018 1:00 AM

I pray every day for Archbishop Justin Welby, though with no very great hope of success. Christians are supposed to pray for their enemies, and he seems to be one of those.

I will never forget the panic-stricken look on his face when I said a friendly hello to him at a Lambeth Palace reception, to which I had obviously been invited by mistake. I suspect – judging by his open dismay – that he would have preferred to have had Satan at his party. I left very soon afterwards.

And later I came to have a really low opinion of his abilities, and of his interest in justice, as I and others battled to get such justice for the truly great Bishop George Bell of Chichester, who died 60 years ago.

Under Archbishop Welby’s leadership, Bishop Bell was publicly denounced by his own Church as a paedophile after a miserable secret kangaroo court. The evidence against him was ancient, thin and uncorroborated, and no defence had even been heard. Yet, now that this process has been exposed as the unfair botch it was, the Archbishop still won’t accept he made a mistake.

And his endorsement of last week’s wild Blairite demand for more taxes and a severe assault on our freedom to pass on our hard-earned life savings to our children, did nothing to improve my opinion.

Christians can be socialists or conservatives, or liberals in politics. Or they can be none of these things. It is their personal actions, not their views, that matter. It is absolutely not the task of the religious leader of England to take sides on political and economic quarrels of which he plainly knows little and understands less.

But does he understand the Gospels any better? In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ at no point says ‘Blessed are the Tax Collectors’. When he tells us to help the hungry, the sick and the homeless, he does not tell us to hand on the job to the State. He tells us to do it ourselves, not through the cold, impersonal agencies of PAYE and the Universal Credit system.

Governments are often very bad at spending money. I pay quite a bit of tax, and wouldn’t mind at all if it went (for example) on an NHS that was well-run, schools that I thought were good, or on a criminal justice system that I thought was effective. But I get none of these things.

And it’s not because the State has too little money that this rich country now has so many food banks.It is because the state is so incompetent at helping those in real trouble. Charities, sustained by private donations and private hard work, often do the job much better.

Higher tax will not mean people give more to charity. It will mean they give less. Worse, if you threaten the freedom to inherit, you threaten private property itself. And if you threaten that, you threaten the whole basis of freedom. Without private property we all become slaves of the secular, anti-Christian state. How can that be a Christian desire?

Nobody is against tax as such. Most of us are in favour of other people paying more tax. But almost nobody is in favour of paying more himself, in practice.

Look into many tax avoidance schemes and you will generally find plenty of right-on leftist comedians and media figures, taking full advantage. And, though HM Revenue & Customs is always happy to accept voluntary extra contributions, for some reason these are rare.

THE Archbishop, amusingly, issued his fatwa against inherited wealth and in favour of tax through the Institute for Public Policy Research. This leftist coven was set up to provide a fancy figleaf for New Labour’s wild debauch of spending and borrowing, which destroyed many pension funds and plunged the nation deep in debt.

But, oh, look, the IPPR, so keen on taxing others, has somehow qualified to be a registered charity. This status normally means not having to pay income or corporation tax, capital gains tax, or stamp duty. Gifts to registered charities are also usually free of the inheritance tax that Archbishop Welby wants to be so strictly applied to the rest of us. They are often spared all or most business rates on their premises, and can get special VAT treatment.

Quite why such outfits as the IPPR should escape the punitive taxes which are now putting so many small firms and shops out of business, I have no idea. Couldn’t the money be better spent on the poor? Perhaps the Archbishop could do something about it?

***

BBC’s squalid excuses for child killers

The over-praised BBC drama Mother’s Day seemed to me to have forgotten who actually murdered Johnathan Ball and Tim Parry in Warrington in 1993.

Well, I certainly remember: the IRA, whose apologists and supporters are now invited to the White House and Windsor Castle, planted high explosives in cast-iron litter bins in the heart of an English town where – as it happened – many Irish people lived. These cruel monsters made sure those fleeing the first bomb would run straight into the blast of the second.

The culprits have never been caught, and if they were, they would be almost immediately released under the nauseating terms of our surrender to the IRA. The drama, in my view, made far too much of stupid excuses issued by Republicans for this crime. It gave valuable airtime to fictional mouthpieces and excuse-makers for the IRA cause. It also greatly exaggerated a minor fire at the Irish club in Warrington to suggest it was six of one and half a dozen of the other.

No doubt Tim and Johnathan were not the first or only children to die in the Troubles. No doubt Loyalist bombs were just as savage. No doubt the British Army and the police were not without faults. But so what? The IRA men who coldly planted bombs outside a town centre branch of McDonald’s, set to go off at lunchtime on a Saturday, deliberately set out to kill and maim innocent people including children and did so, horribly. Nobody made them do it. There was no excuse for this. There never will be.

Nobody, least of all the BBC, should try to make one.

***

A moving message from the Cold War

If ever you are tempted to forget how lucky we are to live on our safe island, see the brilliant new Polish film Cold War, in which Joanna Kulig plays one of a pair of lovers whose lives – which in a free country would have been happy and contented – are utterly ruined by the Iron Curtain. There are no car chases, and there is mercifully little sex. But there is a lot of thought.

***

When I lived in crime-ridden Moscow, I had a solid steel front door. Such things were and are common there. After the recent incident in Bexley in South-East London, when a family out for a meal watched in amazement on a mobile phone (linked to their doorbell) as armed robbers kicked their front door off its hinges at 9pm, I wonder if the time has come to follow Moscow rules here. British houses are not made to withstand such attacks. We assume the law keeps us safe. But bad people are not afraid of the law now.

***

I am increasingly frightened by electric bicycles, actually rather fast, near-silent heavy motorbikes which are unregistered but can kill or maim. Are these ever-more-common things adequately regulated or controlled?

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03 September 2018 1:01 PM

Here are some further thoughts on our ridiculous cultural cringes over foreign names, largely stimulated by a contribution from Geoffrey Warner.

Geoffrey writes :

‘There are problems in transcribing a foreign language into English, especially if the foreign language has no alphabet and is tonal. This is the case with Chinese. Unlike Mr Hitchens, I don't see the use of the Pinyin system of transcription instead of the Wade-Giles as demeaning in any way. It is simply better. I recommend an article on the web entitled "How Wade and Giles did a disservice to the English speaking world" which explains the matter in more detail. If the two systems were similar, it might not matter, but confusion can arise. Thus, a student of mine inadvertently created two separate Chinese warlords in an essay simply because the name of the single warlord in question was transcribed differently in the books she read!’

I reply: I don’t in principle disagree with this, though I personally find Pinyin ridiculous, because of the way it expects the reader to know that letters such as ‘Q’ and ‘X’ are pronounced in a way quite unknown to any culture which uses the Roman alphabet. The man who was for years named in British newspapers as Liu Shao Chi, is now Liu Shaoqi. How is that a better guide to how his name is actually pronounced? And it does daft things, like substituting the hissing, unpronounceable ‘Xinjiang’ for the easily pronounceable ‘Sinkiang’, friendly to an English tongue and eye. Why bother?

I’d also point out that the Chinese language does not really exist in the way that the English language does.

An example from real life: I travelled some years ago deep into the Canton countryside (which Pinyin would insist I called the ‘Guanghzhou’ countryside), to interview a woman who had had her house demolished by the Chinese Communist Party , for daring to refuse an abortion and instead have a second child. This story itself may explain my hostility to any attempts to pander to the Chinese state.

She spoke a Cantonese dialect. The Mayor of the village translated this into standard Cantonese. The driver of our taxi, hired in the city of Canton, then translated this into Mandarin for the benefit of my own translator, who put it into English for me. And of course, the other way round. The interview, as you can imagine, took some time.

So attempts by any English person to attempt an authentic ‘Chinese’ pronunciation are pretty much absurd anyway. And the wide differences in the language spoken in different parts of Planet China are one of the reasons why our names for Chinese cities are often so far from the pronunciations of them in modern ‘official’ post-Mao Mandarin. And this, I suspect, is itself a very different language from pre-revolutionary Mandarin. In the same way, post-Soviet Russian is different (even the alphabet was changed) from pre-1917 Russian, and Estuary English is different in shape, grammar, vocabulary and intonation from the ‘Oxford’ English still unselfconsciously used by the upper crust in my childhood and early teens.

But back to the main subject. There simply is no consistency in the great fashion for using ‘authentic’ names for various countries and cities. The only thing these affectations have in common is a desire for self-abasement.

For a start, they very seldom apply to the *countries* involved as well as the cities. Why not? How many people who pretentiously call Bombay ‘Mumbai’(more on this later) or Calcutta ‘Kolkata’ call India ‘Bharat’? But that is in fact its name, if you believe that we should call foreign places what their inhabitants call them. Likewise, how many of those who insist on calling Peking ‘Beijing’ , and Nanking ‘Nanjing’, refer to China by its actual name of ‘Zhongguo’? In my experience, none of them even know that this is what this country calls itself. My favourite is of course ‘Baile Atha Ciath’, the ‘official’ name for Dublin, which appears on the numberplates of cars registered there. No British person uses it, and quite a lot of Irish people don’t either.I am sure London liberals would use this name if they could only work out how to pronounce it, but it hasn't happened yet. They compensate by calling Londonderry 'Derry'.

Nearer to home, we simply don’t do this at all. Nobody calls Paris ‘Paree’, and seventy years ago English people familiar with France would have called Marseille ‘Marseilles’ in writing and pronounced it ‘Marsails’. I am fairly sure that ‘Lyon’ would also have been known as ‘Lyons’ and pronounced ‘Lions’. In the 19th century, English people simply did not bother to use French pronunciations for internationally famous French names. In his ‘History of England’, Thomas Macaulay refers to Louis XIV as ‘Lewis’. This is not because he was ignorant, but because it was normal to Anglicise French names at that time.

So it still is when most other countries are concerned. I know of nobody in Britain who speaks or writes of ‘Sevilla’, ‘Wien’, ‘Roma’ , ‘Den Haag’, ‘Kobenhaven’ , or come to that ‘Sverige’ or ‘Suomi’, let alone ‘Hrvatska’ , ‘Polska’ , ‘Magyargorszag’ or ‘Ellas’. Though there is a small society of pretentious persons who insist on calling Barcelona 'Baaathelona' , like the BBC experts who call Afghanistan 'Afxhanistan' and the Taleban the 'Tarlybarn'.

I used to get anguished queries from sub-editors about the ‘right’ way to transcribe Russian words into English. There isn’t one. The Cyrillic alphabet, currently with 32 letters, simply doesn’t do a direct transliteration. Gorbachev or Gorbachov? Who cares? Yury, Yuriy or Yury? What does it matter? The same is even more true of Arabic and Farsi. ‘Asad’ or ‘Assad’? ‘Osama’ or ‘Usama’? Tehran or Teheran? Frankly, who needs to know? The chances are that a non-Arabic speaker or non-Farsi speaker wouldn’t even spot these familiar names in a sentence when they were pronounced by a fluent Arabic or Farsi speaker.

Russians don’t say ‘Saint Petersburg’. They say (roughly) ‘Zankt Pitterburg’. When it was called ‘Leningrad’, my Russian teacher, who came from there, despaired of teaching me how to pronounce the ‘Lenin’ part as a Russian would speak it.

Half-educated people think that Moscow is known in Russian as ‘Moskva’. But it isn’t. It is pronounced to sound much more like ‘MaskVA’ with the emphasis heavily on the ‘VA’.

On and on the examples go. A little learning is a dangerous thing. Do they think foreigners call England ‘England’ or London ‘London’? Not often. They have their own names for our country and its famous cities, and this is a compliment to our country and those cities, for being important enough to deserve a Russian or French or Italian renaming. I might ad that thr last time I checked, major French, Germand and Italian newspapers referred to the capital of Zhongguo as ‘Pekin’, not as ‘Beijing’ .Perhaps, not having had to kowtow to China over Hongkong, they just don’t take part in our cultural cringe. .

And so back we come to Bombay. A good friend of mine who comes from there is livid at the way people in the West, thinking they are being enlightened, call it ‘Mumbai’. He associates this name with a rather nasty local demagogue, a Hindu nationalist who insisted on the name change, and he (along with many of his friends and family from Bombay) flatly refuses to use it whether he is there or here. In his view, every time a Westerner uses ‘Mumbai’, that westerner helps strengthen a nasty political tendency, of the kind he would almost certainly disapprove of, if it operated in Britain.

02 September 2018 1:34 AM

Why does our new power elite hate lifelong marriage so much? Why does the legal arm of that elite, the Supreme Court, hand out what is left of the privileges of marriage to those who won’t get married, as it did with the widowed parents’ allowance on Thursday?

Why does the propaganda arm of our ruling class, the BBC, promote a drama called Wanderlust with publicity which, in the BBC’s own words, ‘asks whether lifelong monogamy is possible – or even desirable’. You know as well as I do that they’re not really asking.

They are saying, amid countless wearisome and embarrassing bedroom scenes, that it is neither possible nor desirable. This is a lie, as millions of honest, generous and kind men and women proved in the better generations which came before this one.

Our modern upper crust hate marriage because it is a fortress of private life. They hate it above all because they can’t control it, because it is the place where the next generation learn how to be distinct, thinking individuals instead of conformist robots.

It is where they discover the truth about the past, the lore of the tribe, the traditions and beliefs that make us who we are. It is where they become capable of being free.

But our new rulers don’t want that. They don’t want fully formed people who know who they are and where they come from. They want obedient, placid consumers, slumped open-mouthed in front of screens, drugged into flaccid apathy (legally or illegally, the Government don’t care which), slaving all hours in the dreary low-wage, high-tax economy they are so busily creating.

Much better if they’ve never heard of the great golden drama of our national history and literature, so they don’t know what they’re missing and don’t care.

They would prefer the young to be brought up in a sort of moral car park, knowing nothing except what they are told by authority and the advertising industry. In this brave new world, sex is a spectacle and a sport, solemn oaths are worthless, and duty is a joke.

In this, they are much like the Soviet Communists, who deliberately made divorce as easy as crossing the road, and made absolutely sure that hardly any parents could afford to stay at home to raise their own children.

They have not yet gone quite as far as them – Soviet children were encouraged to worship, as a martyr, a semi-mythical figure called Pavlik Morozov, who was supposedly killed by his grandfather after informing on his own parents to the secret police. Russian friends of mine brought up in this vicious cult shuddered at the memory. But if you look carefully, you will see a ghostly shadow of this culture of denunciation growing up in our midst. And, as we forget all our long history of freedom and justice, it will become easier for such things to happen.

After all, we have long been used to the sight, on TV, of police officers smashing down front doors, or conducting dawn raids – and of being expected to approve of it.

An Englishman’s home is not his castle. And his life is not his own. That is what all this means, and will mean. Amid the grunts and the creaking of bedsprings, and the pompous phrases of the judges, listen hard and you can hear them weaving Britain’s winding sheet.

***

Kitty's dangerous sign of the times

I am sure Lady Kitty Spencer simply cannot have been aware that the necklace in which she poses is designed to resemble marijuana leaves, or why it matters.

The leaves are one of the favourite emblems of the huge, billionaire-backed covert campaign to make this dangerous hard drug acceptable. Quite possibly, she does not know of the alarming and ever-growing evidence that the use of marijuana is correlated with incurable mental illness and severe violence. Surely, nobody who grasps this can want to help in any way in any campaign to make this terrible, life-ruining drug even more available than it already is?

***

The Concrete Party's desecration of beauty

A gloomy, grey shadow now falls across what has until now been an unspoiled part of our beautiful country. I have often bicycled across the quiet counties that lie between Oxford and Cambridge, and found great peace there. It is the intensely English countryside through which John Bunyan tramped as he imagined his great book The Pilgrim’s Progress, with its Celestial City and its Delectable Mountains.

They soon won’t be delectable any more. Our Government, which seems to have sold its soul to the developers, is on the brink of ordering the building there of something called the Oxford-Cambridge Expressway, another hideous stripe of concrete which will tear up trees and scar hills, and create a long, wide corridor of noise, stink and light pollution.Everyone knows that such roads solve nothing, and simply attract more traffic. But they will make billions for the builders of box homes in ugly, bare estates alongside the new road.

Yet the decision already seems to have been taken. Did anyone who voted for this Government think they were voting for the desecration of English beauty? The ‘Conservative’ Party should be forced to change its name to the Concrete Party.

***

I must just mention that David Katz, the most recent rampage killer in the USA, was taking SSRI ‘antidepressants’. I do so because nobody else is making this connection. Almost all such killers have been taking one of three types of mind-altering drugs – SSRIs, steroids and marijuana. Why don’t we care?

***

I am always tickled by the cultural cringes broadcasters and others make towards certain countries. The worst is the grovelling way we call Peking ‘Beijing’, because it pleases the Chinese despots whom we fear so much.

Logically, if we had to call all foreign places by the names they use themselves, we’d need to call Dublin ‘Baile atha Cliath’ and refer to Moscow as ‘Moskva’. But we don’t. It’s oddly selective, and has something to do with political correctness. So when everyone thought Aung San Suu Kyi was a modern saint we started to call Burma ‘Myanmar’ and Rangoon ‘Yangon’. Now she turns out not to be so nice, can we please go back to ‘Burma’ and ‘Rangoon’?

***

The scene of the worst and most shameless racial violence yet seen in modern Germany was the city now known as Chemnitz. Interesting to record that until very recently it was known as Karl Marx City. It’s in the former Marxist east that most of the worst trouble has happened. But 40 years of rigid communism doesn’t seem to have bred tolerance. The Left aren’t as anti-racist as they think they are.

***

Where does the border lie between fiction and fact? The head of MI5, in the BBC’s new thriller Bodyguard, is called Stephen Hunter-Dunn. Can he be related to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, ‘burnished and furnished by Aldershot sun’, the heroine of John Betjeman’s poem about love and tennis? Well, no he can’t because Joan Hunter Dunn (who I thought was invented by the poet) was a real person, a doctor’s daughter who laughed when Betjeman showed her what he had written. Not MI5 material, I think.

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30 August 2018 11:28 AM

Some years ago now I had a small tussle with Lord Heseltine on BBC Question Time. Ever since it has been mis-described on YouTube. Can anyone one fix this?

The YouTube recording, to which I link below, is headlined to suggest that Lord Heseltine said to me that I ‘always was a very cultured demagogue’

This is bizarre, and in any case makes no sense. I agree that the recording is hard to make out, but it is not impossible to do so, and it is easy to see that the words came from me, not Tarzan. What actually happened was that I told Lord Heseltine ‘You always were a very effective demagogue’.

And so he is.

It was particularly memorable because, in what still seems to me to be a slight sacrilege, the programme was broadcast from St Paul’s Cathedral which is one of the great Christian buildings of this country.

The long, cold echo of the Cathedral’s great dome and arches give any words spoken in it a special weight and power.

The crucial moment begins at 5 minutes and 12 seconds into thisrecording

Oddly enough it came out of a discussion on jury trial, about which I had been able, earlier, to demonstrate a certain amount of knowledge of a subject which far too few people bother to study or understand.

But Lord Heseltine, who likes to emphasise his military connections and was in the habit of donning a camouflage jacket in his days as Defence Secretary, decided to try a very low trick indeed, not because he disagreed with me about juries, but just because he dislikes my politecs in general, as far as I could see.

You can watch for yourselves. The most unpleasant part was when he wrongly accused me of calling young soldiers ‘stupid’, and then refused to retract. Let us allow that this allegation was made in the heat of the moment, for the sake of fairness. But I wrote to him afterwards, pointing out that as a Privy Councillor and a Peer of the Realm, he had certain standards to observe, and asking for a retraction. I am still waiting for it.

When I said, which is undeniably true, that young soldiers are unwise, and that this is why governments recruit them in the first place, Lord Heseltine decided to claim that this statement of the obvious was a slur on the armed forces. Anyone who knows anything about me, not least that my father was a career officer in the Royal Navy, would know that I would never do any such thing.

Lord Heseltine also has some connection with those forces. As this fascinating snippet shows, his late father seems to have been something of a military martinet (read to the end) :

And he himself was very briefly (for eight months) in the Army, during the National Service period. But he left the Army early to be a Tory Parliamentary candidate. The account of this in the Daily Mail, extracted from Michael Crick’s 1997 biography of the great man, is very amusing but alas not available on the Internet. I will, however, quote this snippet:

‘In the political life that followed, Heseltine would be dogged by the question of his National Service, compounded by his trying to make political advantage from his military career - he invariably mentions his commission in election literature.

‘The distinctive striped red and blue tie of the Brigade of Guards is also a favourite accessory, such that Heseltine must have worn it on more days than he served.’

Surely this, though a good jibe, cannot be the case? But who will have counted?

Even so, Lord Heseltine spent longer in the Army than another Tory politician whom I shall not name, who, while modest about this himself, has on occasion been feted by his admirers for his military service. My advice is, always check the hard facts if the media start going on about somebody’s military record.

I feel free to mention all this stuff as Lord Heseltine has, on at least two occasions, sought to counter points I have made against him on BBC panel programmes by referring to my long-ago time as a Revolutionary Marxist. This does not really trouble me since almost everyone knows by now about my Trotskyist past because I have, for more than 30 years, been completely open about it.

19 August 2018 1:08 AM

Have you noticed how politicians, police chiefs and media have all stopped pretending that crime is falling? Even the supercilious academics who have sneered for years at real public concern about crime and disorder, tittering from their safe, secluded homes about ‘moral panic’, may eventually have to change their tune.

But there’s another reason. You can hide and fiddle the truth about many types of crime. But you can’t keep stabbing and murder secret in any remotely free society.

The authorities long ago gave up doing anything serious about shoplifting, public drunkenness and disorder, vandalism, bike theft, car theft, robbery and burglary. They just stick up notices telling you that these things are your own fault. They now publicly admit they cannot be bothered to pursue anyone for possessing illegal drugs, even though this offence is at the root of so much other crime. Indeed, they boast about it, as if this laziness and defeatism, a mutinous refusal to do the job we pay them for, were somehow enlightened. They pretend that their inaction will free them to tackle other crimes. It never does.

My own route home, which I often take late and in the dark, was recently the scene of an unprecedented mugging. Parks I have used safely since I was a child have been plagued by various sorts of attacks. How long, I wonder, before the first knifing? Not all that long, I suspect. Round where I live, you are more likely to spot a grazing wildebeest than to see a patrolling police officer. They don’t even pretend that they’re doing it any more.

And now we learn, to my total lack of surprise, that prosecutions have sunk to an all-time low in England and Wales, at a time when even our fishy official figures show that crime is surging upwards.

This is because our 50-year policy of decriminalising crime has finally blown up in our faces. We wait till offenders are hardened criminals before locking them up. When we do lock them up, we let them out as fast as we can. But even then, the prisons can’t hold them. Soft justice, as anyone could have told its supporters, means more crime, for ever.

But whatever you do, don’t dream of trying to defend yourself or your own home. That is almost the only thing that will get you prosecuted and thrown into prison for years. Like all rotten, incompetent monopolies, our criminal justice system can do one thing well – defending itself against competition. When this country eventually goes under, our elite’s infuriating failure to confront or deal with this problem will be one of the main reasons.

***

The real reason nothing works any more

During my now prehistoric education – of hard knowledge, of learning by heart, and the real possibility and fear of failure – a set of English A-levels was said to be worth roughly the same as an American college degree.

Who would say that now? When did anyone last hear of a ‘brain drain’ caused by the USA poaching our best minds – a major problem of that era?

The only interesting thing about the pretence that our exams have not been watered down is that anyone bothers to make it. But like any society run by dogmatic fanatics, our official statistics suffer from what is called the ‘Bikini Effect’. What they conceal is more interesting than what they reveal.

Modern arguments about grammar schools entirely miss the real point. I personally have no doubt, from widespread personal knowledge, that such schools did help many children from poor backgrounds to make the most of their lives. It was a wonderful thing, for them and for the country. But this wasn’t their main purpose. Their main purpose was to educate the next generation so that it would be able to take over and run an advanced, civilised society.

To do that, there was no substitute for the proper knowledge and rigorous learning that such schools provided. Between 1965 and 1975, almost all these schools were destroyed in a mad spasm of egalitarianism.

The private schools, mostly nothing like as good, also lowered their standards, because they could. The new diluted exams made it possible for them to look marvellous when they were just coasting.

And in the years since, there has been a noticeable decline in the quality of our society. Even supposedly educated people don’t know how to think, and don’t actually know very much, by comparison with those who were in charge half a century ago.

And one of the main features of people who can’t think is that they can’t admit their mistakes – and never put them right.

***

Thoughtful Tim gets a rocket... from the snooty BBC

Funniest moment of the week was BBC Radio 4 Today programme presenter Justin Webb trying to lecture astronaut Tim Peake about science and religion. Major Peake, though he does not believe in God, had told a group of schoolchildren that his time in space had made him wonder if the universe might be designed.

'Although I say I’m not religious, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t seriously consider that the universe could have been created from intelligent design,’ he said. ‘There are many things in science that lead us towards that conclusion. From a point of view of seeing how magnificent the Earth is from space and seeing the cosmos from a different perspective, it helps you to relate to that.'

Professor Webb (who as far as I know has never been in orbit) knew better. After saying that this sort of idea was associated with hillbillies who ‘don’t think much of science’ he compared Tim Peake’s view with the long-discredited opinion that the Sun goes round the Earth. Then he chided the spaceman for opening up something that was ‘settled’ and ‘pretty closed’. You’d have to know almost nothing about either science or religion to think that scientists have ruled out the possibility of a designed universe. Einstein, famously, was not an atheist, saying: ‘I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.’ Good advice.

It is typical of the BBC and of its smug ‘flagship’ programme to think that issues which are still open are closed, while simultaneously not knowing much about them.

***

If the media had not assumed that Tuesday’s weird events at Westminster were a terror attack, they might by now have found out something interesting and useful about it. I suppose it is possible that some bearded mullah in an Afghan cave might have wanted a failed student who can barely speak English to drive a Ford Fiesta into a group of cyclists and then into a barrier outside the Palace of Westminster, in the middle of a parliamentary recess. But it is hard to work out who or why. If you think, as I do, that this is most unlikely, you may have a much better idea of the possible reasons for the event.

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